Sunday, November 9, 2025
Job 19:23-27a
Psalm 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
One of my favorite book titles is “Practicing Resurrection.” I am not necessarily recommending this book, though it is a lovely story of a young woman’s journey through the process of becoming ordained - though it is more about following Jesus in a walk of faith. But I bring it to you this morning just to ponder that title because “practicing resurrection” is what this lesson from Luke is about this morning.
When the Pharisees try to trip him up again about the law, Jesus tries to help them understand that practicing resurrection is quite different from the letter of the law. When we are faced with our tendency to be right about things, when we act like the pharisees, it’s best to stop and remember that it’s not about being right, it is about living in the light and joy and discipleship of following Jesus. Practicing resurrection.
But what does that mean? And how do we do practice resurrection?
I struggled with these lessons this week. Forgive me as I move along here if I seem to be all over the place, trying to talk about all of them. But these readings are challenging. I wanted to skip the whole thing or step around and preach on something more joyful like the prodigal son coming home or when that woman found that lost coin or Jesus found that lost sheep (Luke 15) and then sing one of our favorite songs and go to lunch.
But that is the beauty of the lectionary. It is a discipline. It holds us accountable. We study this three year cycle of scripture and that keeps us on a certain track. This discipline is, in itself a reminder of all the ways we need to discipline ourselves and our community, we need to get in better shape, step up to the plate, check in with our prime directive (if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors).
But the pendulum swings again and we find ourselves wanting to be free spirits with less rules, less law, less order so that we can live that good old “anything goes” lifestyle and not be held accountable. There is some merit in this. It does include listening to the wiles of the Holy Spirit. But we need a balance between structure and individual, free expression.
So this week was challenging for me in my prayers and efforts to lead you, this congregation as your pastor toward what is really important. Your council had some difficult discussions lately about what it means to be accountable. How are we accountable to each other? So, I have been struggling with that lately too.
And what I do when I’m in this place of struggle with my own discipleship is pause and breathe and listen to the Holy Spirit. Yes, study and thinking and talking all can help but we need to prioritize prayer.
And in my prayer life this week I got a repeated message of the many stories of lost and found. And I found that the pharisees seem really lost in their ways of using the law to destroy Jesus.
It is five chapters back in Luke, Chapter 15 where Jesus taught about lost things. Jesus left the ninety-nine to go and find that one lost sheep. The coin was lost, so that woman searched deeply until she found it. The prodigal son came to his senses because he got himself into a crisis and he woke up one day and realized how lost he was. And he chose to go home.
God kept reminding me of this stuff about losing things in the fifteenth chapter of Luke. It came to me through random conversations, and silly stuff I watched on TV and things I chose to read. It kept coming up this week. How can we realize that we are lost and ask for help? What can we do to call the lost souls home?
A recent book helped. It is called Lost and Found by Kathryn Schultz. While this book is more about grief, which we all face, Schultz brings home the theme about living all of our lives with loss. This goes along well beside our effort to live in resurrection.
Here is one of the many statistics Schultz mentions: “According to data from surveys and insurance companies, each of us misplaces roughly nine objects per day - which means that by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost nearly two hundred thousand things.” And I thought I just lost my glasses again.
This is one of many ways Schultz emphasizes that we all live with lots of loss. Like jobs and marriages and loved ones who have gone on to heaven. Jesus responds to the question not by outsmarting the pharisees, not this time. Jesus reminds us here that practicing resurrection is very different from drawing lines in the sand or not losing things, as if that were possible.
This passage from Luke is messy. It is a story within the story, at a moment when the pharisees were once again testing and goading Jesus with the law and the problems of inconsistencies in the law and theology of their basic values. And Jesus answers with ethereal and hard to follow, maybe even confusing stuff that goes so far beyond our reality that it gets scary. How can we believe in this stuff he’s talking about. How can we believe in life after death? How can we believe in resurrection? How can we even believe in redemption?
That’s how we fallible humans always respond to the gospel - the good news. We over think it. Not only did Jesus rise from the dead, not only did Jesus save us in his passion on the cross, his sacrificial death and his resurrection, but he promises that we too will rise.
But we respond with a big, “Wait. What?!” Because we can’t really fathom resurrection, not fully. We can’t fully wrap our minds around it.
We try. We try really hard. We just decide to believe and follow and that’s all you need. And that goes OK for a while but then we sin. We snap at our loved ones. We refuse to forgive. We cheat or tell white lies or worse.
Or we let the unfathomable fact of resurrection get us anxious. And we start to worry. We worry about the dwindling numbers in our church, in the church treasury or in our own bank accounts. We fail to worry about the poor or the hungry. We worry more about ourselves.
And then it gets really ugly. When our anxiety goes up so does the conflict between us. Friendships end over differing political views. Families fall apart. People start getting at each other’s throats. And we end up like the psalmist (believed to be David) from today’s psalm who prays to God for vindication. Or like Job who demanded vindication.
And that is when we really start wanting structure again. Or maybe we want free from structure. Either way, we end up confused and asking Jesus on our knees stupid questions like who we will be married to in heaven.
We end up lost again and again.
But Job, here’s the gem for this morning, Job was not lost. Job lost everything, he was beaten down, sick, sorrowful and bereft. But he was not lost. Job maintained his faith in the worst conditions. Or, it is better to say that his deep faith saved him. He complained and he demanded vindication, sure, but in the end he succumbed to the ultimate sovereignty of God.
And the gem in this little section of that story is that he never lost faith in or love for God. “I know that my redeemer lives,” he says. He knows. And so, we too can remember all the ways that we know.
The answer to the puzzle here is to let go of trying to pin down the rules or figure out how to break them for that matter. We need to realize that practicing resurrection is doable. It is a possible, it’s a real thing that Jesus calls us to and leads us toward. Practicing resurrection consumes us and causes our souls to breathe.
I’ve been hanging out with some old friends from High School. A couple of them came to visit on the Sunday of Rhythm and Roots weekend. We were doing that other “R” word usually dropped from the name of the festival, Reunion.
One of those friends is Kathryn Thomas who is an opera singer. We grew up together over at State Street Methodist. And she amazed us all with her singing. Not just how well she sang but that she could sing well at difficult times.
In 1986, about 10 years before a similar losses in this parish, when you lost Tammy and Andrew. Way back when, we lost a young adult, Champe Hyatt who was 23 years old when she died. It was a food allergy thing. And it left our entire community shocked and deep in grief. She was my cousin. We were very close, her parents and my parents, her siblings and my siblings, and it was the worst loss I have ever been through. Because every other personal loss I have had in the following years made sense and that one didn’t.
But Kathryn, because she loved the Hyatts and because they asked, stood in front of that packed, full house funeral and sang that song from Handle’s Messiah, “I Know that my Redeemer Liveth.”
And you know what I remember from that moment. We didn’t cry more. Even in response to such beautiful music, we didn’t cry more. We stopped crying. I did anyway. Because of Kathryn’s strength. Because of the reminder that we are all strong in our losses because we know that our Redeemer lives.
And Kathryn is not some sort of hero or guru. She’s just a person, an old friend of mine, nobody special - any more than we all are special. None-the-less, and this is bold, be like Kathryn. Not just brave enough to sing in public or at a moment when singing seems the least likely thing you will be able to do, but practice resurrection. Be willing to stand up and sing, or at least say, “I know that my redeemer lives.”
“I know that my redeemer lives.”
This place is named after that Redeemer. And like that Redeemer, this church still lives. And we still live. And we are constantly found and brought home again when we get lost. Week after week, year after year.
And we know that our Redeemer Lives. And we know that he comes to us and leads us along and eventually leads us home.
So let’s practice that. Let’s practice our hope in the Lord and put away our silly human ways of trying to pin down the rules about God or try to know now what will not be clear until then or get so worried that we get at each other’s throats. Let’s just have faith. Let’s just practice resurrection, even if we’re not sure what that means.
If we have just a little faith, the love and grace and mercy of our Lord will see us through.
Amen.
Pastor Kathy Kelly
1 Nora Gallagher, Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace, Knopf Doubleday, 2004.
2 Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found : Reflections on Grief, Gratitude and Happiness, Random House, 2022, p. 13.